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Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:24:54 +0300
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Type hinting revisited for PHP 5.3
From: ionut.g.stan@gmail.com ("Ionut G. Stan")

Hi,

I'm a userland developer with limited C skills, and while I don't yet 
have an
opinion on the whole type enforcing issue, aside from a fear of 
libraries abusing
it, I'd like to propose a little change in the patch.

Is it possible that instead of an E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR, an Exception to
be thrown? I don't know whether InvalidArgumentException satisfies the 
semantics,
but it's a step in that direction.

On 7/1/2009 19:59, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:
> There has been quite a bit of discussion on this list, IRC, developer 
> meetings, etc... about introduction of type hinting to PHP. Most 
> people appear to think that this would be a good idea, but there is a 
> reason why it is not in PHP already. The main source of conflict 
> appears to be that in some cases typical type hinting is just too 
> strict for PHP's typeless nature (most people expect that "1" == 1, 
> while int type hint would definitely reject string "1").  Personally, 
> I disagree with that opinion, but I can understand people who raise 
> that issue. At work we've been using PHP 5.2 with type hinting for 
> nearly 2 years now with great success, it makes code much easier to 
> read and understand and the security benefit of type hinting is not to 
> be under valued. In many cases type hinting can present a last line of 
> defense against unexpected input for numeric fields, which are 
> typically abused to do SQL injection.
>
> I've taken a few hours this morning to port my 5.2 type hinting patch 
> to 5.3. In recognition of a need for a more 'flexible' numeric type 
> I've introduced (numeric) type hint that would allow bool/int/float 
> data types as well as a string containing a numeric entity as 
> identified by is_numeric_string(). For completion i've also added 
> (scalar) data type that will allow any scalar data element.
>
> The patch is available here: http://ia.gd/patch/type_hint_53.txt
>
> It should be noted that this patch is fully compatible with opcode 
> caches and and requires no changes on the part of an opcode cache such 
> as APC to work.
>
> My hope is that the latest changes will allow this to become a 
> standard part of PHP.
>
> Ilia Alshanetsky
>
> P.S.
>
> It should be noted that this is not the first idea for type hints, 
> that credit goes to Hannes Magnusson who had posted a similar patch on 
> the internals list back in 2006. Also, back in 2008 Felipe Pena wrote 
> a type hinting patch for PHP that is available on wiki.php.net.

-- 
Ionut G. Stan
I'm under construction  |  http://igstan.blogspot.com/